A dog’s bark. The husky stood at the base of the station steps. Even in the overcast light its eyes seemed luminous. It barked again, turned, trotted down the street, stopped, barked, and ran back to the foot of the stairs as rain spattered the road.
‘Lincoln, I just heard from prison transport. There was an accident. Carlson and his big friend have escaped.’
Chapter 53
ANOTHER BRICK DROPPED to the floor behind her. Carlson seemed locked in some kind of trance, staring at the fireplace. Thunder clapped overhead. More bricks fell. Dust and debris rose around her but still Carlson seemed transfixed. She took her chance, leapt to her feet and threw a punch aimed squarely at his swollen nose. He went down with barely a word.
Rain beat against the tin roof as she turned to see what had held Carlson transfixed.
She gasped and dropped to her knees.
It wasn’t possible.
How could she not have known, not sensed it?
It couldn’t be true. It couldn’t.
She’d spent so much time hating him because he’d left them, because everything she loved about him was a lie. She’d been wrong. All that time she’d believed the wrong lie.
The shrunken, leathery face still held sun-bleached hair. The decayed fabric hanging off the mummified thighs were undeniably the boardies he’d worn to the barbeque.
‘Oh, Dad.’ She reached out to touch what had once been his cheek, but a cringe of revulsion stayed her hand. ‘Dad, I’m so sorry.’
He hadn’t run off with another woman. He hadn’t deserted her mother and hastened her decline. The real Jacko Everton wasn’t a thief or a liar. The loving father she remembered from childhood hadn’t been a lie. He’d been here, waiting to be found.
Someone had killed him. Walled him up just meters from their home.
A foot scraped against the gritty floor. Through the dank air came the waft of something astringent. Familiar. Just like—
Mina turned toward the door. Silhouetted against the gloomy sky was the man who’d been in her house, who’d attacked her. It had to be. He had the same build, the same reek of aftershave.
Then he fiddled with his tie, stepped closer and the shadows fell from his face.
Mina squinted against the poor light. ‘Mr Baldwin?’
She sat back on her heels. This couldn’t be right. She knew he’d never liked her, had always been jealous of her closeness with Forbes and her perceived influence over the man he worshipped. It was why he’d championed Ronny Clarke about her house—so she’d leave Failie and take her bad influence with her—but he wouldn’t have attacked her. He wouldn’t have tried to scare her out of her house. He was just a pencil pusher.
‘Mr Baldwin, call triple zero. I need help.’
He looked her over then cast a dispassionate gaze across the prone bodies of Carlson and Tiny, to the splintered bench, the tools strewn across the floor, the discarded curtain tie that had bound her hands, and finally to her father’s remains.
Maybe he hadn’t heard her above the rain, but surely he understood what he saw. His mobile phone was clipped to his belt. Why didn’t he use it? The storm was moving off. He couldn’t be afraid of getting zapped.
‘It’s Dad.’ Her throat thickened with tears. ‘I found him. We need to call the police. And the vet. My dog is injured.’
‘Drop the pathetic little girl act.’ His wet hair stuck up worse than usual and his crumpled suit was marbled with water. ‘I’ve heard them gossiping about your phantom dog. Everything you do is aimed at grabbing the limelight. You and your family have done enough damage to Forbes’ reputation. He’s lucky I know what’s best.’
‘Forbes doesn’t—’
‘Quiet!’ He sounded nothing like the obsequious fool she knew. He thrust out his hand. ‘The watch. Give it to me.’
The watch? Why would he want that? It had nothing to do with him, nothing to do with her selling the house. It was only evidence of—
Mina stared at the man entombed in the fireplace. That’s why Baldwin wanted her out of the house. It was never about the development. It was only about what was hidden in the workshop, because regardless of whether she sold up, let the place fall into ruin or handed it over to the heritage crowd, the workshop was bound to offer up its secret. The embezzlement case would be reopened. Questions would be asked.
She looked back at Baldwin, saw him swoop up something from the floor. A wrench. The giant one she’d thrown at Carlson.
‘All this time—you knew?’ she asked.
Baldwin tested the heft of the wrench. Each step brought him closer, cutting off her escape. Mina scrambled backwards, but stone walls surrounded her and at her back was the fireplace with its relic.
She called for Spirit. Silence. The corner where she’d last seen him, lying injured and whimpering, was empty. Yet she couldn’t have imagined him. He had to be real. He’d taken out the big Maori.
‘It would have been better for Forbes if he’d never done it,’ Baldwin said, ‘but he did.’
Her heart stammered. She couldn’t possibly have heard right. The storm must have distorted his words, though the thunder had moved off and the rain softened to a patter.
Forbes had been their only support. He was the voice of reason. When the women gathered in their kitchen that barbeque weekend had started whispering about an affair, it was Forbes who’d sent them packing. When those whispers became heckles in the street, it was Forbes who’d stood by them despite the flack he’d taken for doing so from the town and his father. When she and her mother had argued over what to do with Jacko’s belongings, he had helped them find a compromise.
‘Forbes would not kill my father.’ Her voice struggled through the fear camped in her chest. ‘He loved him.’
She scooted as far away from Baldwin as she could, but the only choice was to get closer to the hole in the fireplace. He raised the heavy wrench in his left hand. Only a few steps more and she’d be trapped. There was nowhere to go and no hope of help. Spirit always arrived when she needed him—he’d chased off the intruder, stood guard over her as she slept, taken care of Tiny while she battled Slab—but he couldn’t help her this time. All she had were her wits, and the knowledge that someone as ridiculed as Baldwin would be desperate for recognition.
She said, ‘It was you who changed the card on that wreath, wasn’t it?’
Baldwin stopped walking and laughed. ‘Best bit of theatre I ever saw was when you read that card. Forbes finally saw you as the looney you are.’
‘How could you see that? Not from the street. I would have noticed.’
‘There are other places than from the street to observe your pathetic life.’
‘How very clever of you.’
Baldwin missed her sarcasm and preened. He still had the wrench held high. She pictured him hiding in her bushes. All those times she’d thought she’d heard something, had convinced herself she’d imagined it—they’d all been real. He must have spent hours there, just watching and waiting.
‘Did you write the letter too?’
‘Letter?’ Uncertainty showed in his face then his cocksure attitude reasserted itself. ‘Forbes was so desperate to be mayor, it was only a matter of time before he realised what a millstone the Evertons were.’
She forced laughter into her voice. ‘Forbes would never turn to you for help. He laughs about you behind your back. Makes fun of your hair, the way you dress, how often you fiddle with your tie.’
‘Shut up!’ Baldwin’s face flushed. He drew his lips back in a snarl that would have rivalled Spirit’s. ‘He values me. Without me, he’d still be stealing from the council coffers.’
Council coffers? Did he mean Forbes had stolen the fund money?
‘That’s a lie! You’re just covering for yourself.’
He stood over her now, the day’s dim light behind him. One blow from that wrench and nothing would matter, but she refused to let this self-important bastard beat her. Not now she knew the truth. She wanted the li
fe she’d denied herself by wasting all that time hating her dad.
Her fingers scratched against the solid weight of a brick just as Baldwin brought the wrench down. She fell sideways and rolled away. The wrench hit the hearth. The clang of metal on stone rang in her ears. She tried to get a good grip on the brick as Baldwin retrieved the wrench.
‘Put the weapon down.’ Linc stood in the doorway, his gun trained on Baldwin.
Baldwin bellowed with rage. He lifted the wrench, but Linc moved swiftly and yanked his arm down and behind his back. She heard the wrench drop, the snap of cuffs.
In the doorway, Spirit stood panting. Then he trotted up to her and dropped against her thigh. She put her arms around his damp fur, felt his heart beating and his warm breath against her skin. He seemed fine. Perfectly fine and perfectly real.
‘It’s okay, Mina.’ Linc held her gaze. ‘No one can hurt you now.’
Chapter 54
SUMMER WAS ALMOST over now and a cool breath pierced the salty southerly. Seagulls hovered, cawing demands for food that would go unanswered. At the end of the Failie jetty, Linc stretched his arm along the back of the bench seat, marvelling that Mina sat beside him.
‘Are you ready?’ he asked.
She shook her head and caressed the urn at her side. ‘I can’t let him go just yet. Soon. Then I’ll let him be with Mum or roll with the ocean or whatever it is that happens to us.’
‘I hope we don’t have to find out for ourselves anytime soon.’
She shifted position and kissed him, deep and slow, a reminder that they were still here, still alive, with as much time as they needed.
‘You’re doing well to say that,’ she teased.
‘I know.’
He still couldn’t make all the words he needed to say to her travel from his brain to his mouth, but he was working on it. She said she understood. He pulled her closer. He couldn’t stop touching her, half-afraid she’d vanish if he didn’t keep the connection alive, astonished that after everything he’d done, she’d chosen him.
Apart from three kids fishing a few metres behind them, the jetty was deserted. He’d had a tense hour waiting in the blustery wind for her to return from the funeral home. He would never have agreed to let her go alone if he hadn’t been certain she was safe. And he’d understood she needed time with her father’s remains.
‘If I hadn’t made a wrong turn off the freeway and found his watch in Keg’s junk store,’ Mina said, ‘we never would have discovered the truth about him. We wouldn’t have cleared his name.’
Linc watched her profile as she gazed at the horizon. Her lips curved in a soft smile. Her cheeks free of tears. She’d told him she had cried enough.
Over the last few weeks, as the sheets cooled beneath them, she’d told him everything: finding the watch and thinking her dying mother might have been right about Jacko’s return; convincing herself he must be living nearby with the woman he’d left them for; certain he’d made himself over into Bernie Johnstone; wondering if she was crazy. He knew how hard it had been for her to open up and wished he could be as brave. Some things, those that made him vulnerable, were still locked so deep they resisted release.
Mina pulled the fob watch from her coat pocket and traced the cover with her forefinger, her face soft with sorrow. ‘He always said the original owners were star-crossed lovers. I guess he and Mum were the same.’
‘Does the picture have a story?’
‘Everything with Dad had a story. This one was about a superhero dog called Spirit and his pet sidekick Jackson.’
She chuckled. It was throaty, infectious, and he would never tire of hearing it.
‘My entire childhood was one big fairytale. Maybe that’s why I found it too easy to believe in his guilt.’
‘You didn’t always. You spent the first year defending him, expecting him to come home.’
‘Who told you that? Forbes?’
Her even tone didn’t fool him. He saw the sudden tightness in her jaw and heard her shallow breath.
‘Have you spoken to him since his hearing?’
She shook her head and gazed at the whitecaps skipping across the choppy sea. ‘I got as far as the prison gates.’
‘I’ve spent hours with him,’ Linc said. ‘What he did, as misguided as it was, he did out of love.’
‘Not everything.’
She touched the urn beside her and they fell into silence. How much should he tell her of what Forbes had revealed? To offer details of the fight between the two friends over Forbes’ theft of the money—the angry shove, the crack of Jacko’s head against a jutting stone in the workshop wall, the panic when Forbes realised what he’d done—would only add to her nightmares.
‘Do you want to know about the surprise your dad planned for your mother the night of the barbeque?’
Mina looked at him, and he saw her curiosity.
‘Was it a dark room?’ she asked.
‘How did you know?’
‘Just before the barbeque, Arnie and Dad spent a lot of time together, whispering and plotting, and checking out that box room in our house. Arnie’s niece told me he was a keen photographer who’d set up a darkroom at home.’ She gazed out to sea. ‘I never really put it together. Didn’t want to think about Dad.’
Linc put his arm around her shoulders. She laced her fingers through his and brushed her cheek against it. It was just like the first time he’d touched her, in the hallway of her house, but now she didn’t throw off his hand in disgust. He still found it incredible that she was here, that she could love him with all his faults and brittle principles.
‘Your dad wanted her to have something that was still creative but less demanding physically.’
‘Did Forbes tell you that?’
He nodded.
‘So, he knew.’ Her brow furrowed. ‘Just like he knew where Jacko was all this time. Like he knew Jacko had never taken that money. He watched my mother die, let me fall apart, and he never said a word. I suppose he had Dad’s watch all that time too. Or was that Baldwin?’
‘Dunny and his mates found it when they broke into Forbes’ place.’
Forbes had told him how he’d spotted the watch in the grass beside the barbeque. By then he and Baldwin had bricked up the fireplace, the workshop had been locked up and Mina and her mother whisked away for a few weeks under the pretence of looking after Alyssa Everton’s health. He’d been lucky that neither Alyssa nor Mina had wanted to go near it. Luckier still that the double-brick fireplace and the filthy chimney trapped the smell of decomposition.
Mina took a deep breath, as though steadying her nerve, then looked up at him. ‘Did Forbes tell you what he did with the money?’
‘Put it all in the stock market. It’s how he rebuilt his family’s fortune.’
‘He once said he made a killing. I never dreamt he meant it literally.’
He trailed his fingers along the faint scar on her cheek. ‘Do you hate him?’
The wind moved a pale strand of hair across her eyes. She tucked it behind her ear. ‘I don’t want to be ruled by hatred anymore. If I hadn’t been so angry with you, with everyone, Derek might still be alive.’
‘He made his own choices, Mina. You tried to warn him and he panicked. Phone records show he called Carlson. Stupid. He must have known Carlson wasn’t going to let him walk.’
‘Derek never did understand other people had a will of their own. Are they sure Riker shot him?’
‘Ballistics proved it was his gun.’
They’d pulled Riker’s body from the weir, far from Carlson’s usual dumping ground. The water had degraded the gunshot residue, but they could place him at the scene.
She said, ‘He was terrified of Carlson.’
‘Thanks to your testimony, two killers will get life.’
He hadn’t told her what they’d found in the bar fridge at the penthouse. She was making great progress at working through her trauma and he wasn’t going to derail that.
Seagulls ci
rcled overhead. One dove into the choppy water and came up with something writhing and glistening in the sun. Behind them came a shout. He turned, ready to fight, but it was only the boys fishing from the jetty. One of them flapped his arms as he yelled. Linc saw something move near their bait bucket. Probably Spirit sniffing out the catch. The boy moved. A pelican, as big as the smallest boy, eyed off the spoils in the bucket.
Mina took his hand and pressed the watch into his palm. As he closed his fingers around it, he thought of how she’d given him the iPod with the evidence against Carlson in exactly the same manner. Carlson had threatened and deceived her into going along with his plans. Yet she’d still risked everything to get the evidence that would prove Linc’s case, well aware that if they did both survive the ordeal—even the non-existent one to Linc’s life—a win would get him back to Sydney. Carlson could have killed her.
‘God, Mina, what I put you through—’
She touched two fingers to his lips. Mina refused to let him acknowledge what she’d done, but if he hadn’t been so uptight, so afraid of losing the fragments of his own career, he might have seen the truth. She could have died because he had to see the world in black and white.
‘It’s time,’ she said.
In the strong offshore, another strand blew across her face. She hooked the stray lock behind her ear and whistled for her dog. From somewhere behind came an answering bark. It was no wonder Forbes hadn’t believed her about the dog; Spirit was pretty damn good at making himself scarce.
At the end of the jetty, waves slapped the pylons with foaming white fingers, sending mists of spray over the boards. This was Jacko’s favourite place. Mina had talked more and more about her memories of her father and his love for this spot, how he’d always claimed the surf break was crap, but on a good day, a talented dude like him could make the right-hander pump. Linc ran his fingers over the watch so strongly associated with her father. It was easy to understand her fascination. He pressed the catch and the beautiful cover popped open. The inscription read ‘Forever’.
Something brushed against his thigh.
Pieces of a Lie Page 33